Mental Health and Academic Life in the Time of The COVID-19 Lockdown
How is your mental health doing during the pandemic? Remember when you said “this’ll be over in two weeks”? Well, it’s been quite an amount of time since then.
Actually, it’s been a year. Let’s go back to late February 2020 when Lebanon was hit with the first few cases of COVID-19. After a week of the first ‘positive’ case schools and universities around the country announced closure for the two coming weeks. Thinking it’d only be two weeks, there was no direct plan to how we’ll manage things if there was no going back. Finally, after a few weeks of uncertainty, educational institutions in the country caved in and settled on finishing their curriculum online. In this long year of ups and downs, students went through a lot of thoughts and emotions processing this sudden change. This is how students , and myself survived online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
My Perspective
My alarm is buzzing at 5:00 AM on a Monday morning, which marks my 3rd on-line semester. “Why at 5:00 AM?” you ask, well I like my mornings to start early so I can contemplate before the start of the day. However, like every on-line semester—supposing that’s a norm now—I never end up staying on track with this routine. I slowly lose motivation to wake up or do anything at all.
This semester was worse, since it started with pretty much a full-on lockdown disabling me to go anywhere to take a breather. As the semester progressed, it got worse, and I kept losing more motivation to study. For some courses, I completely stopped taking notes, and for the courses where comprehending the material in class was too much, I would skip zoom calls or sign in and put my iPad somewhere in the background. I started depending on self-learning the material only few days before an exam for tough courses that still follow the somewhat traditional examination format, as for practical course I’d put the work on hold for the very last minute, since I literally could not focus or get myself to work if I wasn’t pressured to do so. Pre pandemic, I never really studied at home, and I’d usually depend on finishing my material in the library or at a local café or Starbucks, but with lockdown I had to create a work environment at home, and it is extremely hard to psychologically dissociate your work space with your rest space—which pretty much all of us had to do.
Personally, I think this COVID-19 crisis opened people’s eye on the concept of working from home. I’d hear a lot of people say ‘working from home doesn’t mean your job is real’ or ‘people who work from home are getting paid to lay on their couch all day’. However, working from home can be twice as tough as actually going to an office considering one literally has to turn their comfort zone, and rest space into a work space.
Students on Surviving On-line Education During the Covid-19 Lockdown
To give a better idea of how lockdown and on-line education affected students’ mental health I’ve contacted a few students to give me their input on the situation.
Rasha, a sophomore at the Lebanese American University majoring in translation, who suffered of depression prior to the pandemic said this situation made her depression worse. She also mentioned how an on-campus experience would’ve been nicer considering she could socialize, but with online it’s just harder considering students are working twice as hard without that option or incentive.
Ahmad, a first-year computer science major, mentioned that this experience made courses a lot tougher on him and ruined the on-campus experience he was hoping to live in college.
Sheimaa, a sophomore economics major at Haigazian University, found herself unable to do simple tasks like get out of bed, clean her room, or even shower. She added “you really can’t just email your instructor, and tell them that you feel like this, they probably won’t get it”.
Zeinab, a sociology student at the Lebanese University, testified that it’s really “depressing to live like this”. She added that it’s even much harder on her since she isn’t very well acquainted with technology.
Mohamad, a Public relations student at the Lebanese International University claimed that he really feels as if the pressure is purely on him to self-learn the material, and that some of his instructors are using WhatsApp to hold sessions which is making understanding the material really difficult.
Are you a university student and want to share your experience with us? Comment below or send us a short text here.
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